Food safety

Challenge

The presence of pathogenic microorganisms such as salmonella, listeria and E. coli in foods is a major threat to consumer safety and the food industry at large. The failure to detect these pathogens can result in severe outbreaks of food-borne illness. The economic burden of food-borne pathogens is over $100 billion annually and results in the death of over four hundred thousand people worldwide each year. Current methods for detection are costly, involve complicated sample preparation and require days to yield results thereby increasing the severity of outbreaks.

Solution

Hinalea Imaging has developed a new means of rapid, reliable pathogen detection. The self-contained system combines hyperspectral imaging, microscopy and deep machine learning which includes automated sample loading and detection.

Outcome

Collaboration with the USDA has demonstrated rapid identification of pathogens in under 4 hours thereby significantly reducing time to diagnosis and respond with a pathway to detection times of under an hour. This is revolutionary and changes pathogen detection and response from a laborious and time-consuming lab process to a user-friendly point-of-care solution.

Food quality

Challenge

Conventional machine vision systems are largely ineffective for the stringent evaluation of food and agricultural products. Commonly used machine vision systems utilize color video cameras with RGB filters that seek to replicate the imaging functionality of the human eye. This level of performance is inadequate for many of the functions required in modern processing environments.

Solution

Hyperspectral Imaging is a next generation imaging technology that can be used as an augmentation or replacement to existing machine vision systems. Hyperspectral imaging provides high spectral and spatial resolution to enable comprehensive and data rich inspection of foods and other products. Hyperspectral imaging can be extended into the UV or IR range providing details on chemical and structural composition not discernable in the visible spectrum.

Outcome

Hyperspectral imaging provides added spectral information that can be utilized by manufacturers for improved quality assurance in a broad array of food safety and quality areas, including¹:

1. Detecting harmful foreign objects like plastics, wood, stones, metals and glass ;
2. Identifying mechanical damage like bruising and abrasion ;
3. Measuring food quality through attributes like ripeness, decay, freshness and ingredient homogeneity.

Precision agriculture

Challenge

With global population set to hit 9 billion, the demand for food and water continues to grow. This heightened demand is going to put increasing pressure on the agriculture industry to improve crop yield and farm productivity. This need comes to an industry already stressed by farm economics and one that is struggling to manage the impact of climate change. Precision agriculture is seen by many as a potential solution for the agriculture industry.

Solution

Precision agriculture is a farming management technique based on measuring and responding to the inter and intra-field variability in crops. Precision agriculture couples new technology with traditional farming techniques so that farmers can do more with less. Hinalea Imaging offers intelligent hyperspectral imaging solutions that can aid with the process of precision agriculture. Hinalea’s solutions couple state of the art imaging hardware with custom machine learning algorithms to solve specific farming problems. These systems can be mounted statically or deployed on UAV’s or other vehicles.

Outcome

Hyperspectral imaging provides added spectral information that can be utilized by farmers for an array of precision agriculture applications:

• Plant health & hydration ;
• Weed mapping ;
• Disease detection ;
• Optimizing harvesting.

Industrial & defense

Challenge

In addition to our work optimizing and safeguarding food supply chains, Hinalea works with customers to solve their problems across a range of industrial & remote sensing applications. In each of these applications, the customer problem we are solving is different. Current projects include:

• Aerial surveillance for threat detection ;
• Identification of chemical degradation of pipes ;
• QA of electrical components and displays ;
• Inspection of packaging ;
• Classification of raw materials.

Solution

In each of these use cases, Hinalea has been able to configure its imaging platform to address our specific customer requirements. The flexible form factor allows Hinalea to develop solutions for the specific environments of interest:

• UAV mounted SWIR imager capable of real-time imaging & classification ;
• Imager mounted on crawler for inspection of pipes in environmentally hazardous areas ;
• Integrated In-line quality assurance system for product grading ;
• Stand-alone, end of line quality assurance system for quality sampling.